BeOS may be dead, but over a decade after its lamentable demise the open source Haiku project keeps its legacy alive. Haiku is an attempt to build a drop-in, binary compatible replacement for BeOS, as well as extending the defunct OS's functionality and support for modern hardware. At least, that's the short-term goal - eventually, Haiku is intended significantly enhance BeOS while maintaining the same philosophy of simplicity and transparency, and without being weighed down with the legacy code of many other contemporary operating systems. Computerworld Australia recently caught up with Stephan Assmus, who has been a key contributor to the project for seven years for a lengthy chat about BeOS, the current state of Haiku and the project's future plans.

Just exactly what does Haiku or BeOS do better than Linux? My question is as genuine as it is rhetorical.

That's easy. Two things...

Uncompromising responsiveness. It is a heavily threaded, tightly scheduled, single user OS with a UI that is designed to respond with absolute minimal latency, even when heavily taxed.

Simplicity. When you start digging into the guts of the file system and peel back the initial layers of the OS you find... Nothing. There are few if any layered abstractions. The same goes for the API, the number of moving parts is quite small.

Is either of these things the most important attributes of an OS? Not really, but that is kind of the point. The priorities of BeOS/Haiku are and have always been different from most other Operating Systems.